Director, Guillermo del Toro: Gris Grimly designed an amazing Pinocchio—to me the best Pinocchio I’ve seen because it’s basically so simple and it has an innocence and a purity to its expressions and the ungainliness of his body, which is very, very childlike, you know? And that was a lynchpin. That was a cornerstone.
Illustrator, Gris Grimly: Tor is a publishing house and they wanted me to do a cover of Pinocchio and then I read the book and I was like, "This is such a rich story." So I did a fully illustrated chapter book for it.
After the book was published, me and some friends started to develop how this could be a movie. And we came up with a list of directors, and Guillermo was top on the list. Shortly after that, I got a call from a gallery that was selling my artwork, and they said that Guillermo came in and bought a piece of my Pinocchio artwork. And I said, "You’ve got to be kidding me!"
They called him up and we had lunch. And this was 2004, I think. It’s been a long time coming. This has been like 20 some years.